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This past week, Mayor Paul Soglin (D – Madison, WI) decided to take down monuments of the Confederacy at a local cemetery. Nowhere in his public statement is there a reference to the Democratic party.
Soglin writes: “We will honor our history. We will respect the dead. We make sure that our legacy is to tell the truth and to remove evidence of racist historical revisionism. We will use the story of these monuments to tell the truth about a century of Jim Crow, economic oppression and those like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan who spread their lies far beyond the boundaries of the rebellious states.”
“Mayor Soglin’s telling of this story without mention of his party’s hand in this shameful chapter of American history is racist historical revisionism,” said Scott Grabins, Chair of the Republican Party of Dane County.
According to the RPDC Chair, it is bewildering that the Democrats are trying to remove statues of other Democrats from the country’s public spaces, while at the same time, they are calling Lincoln Republicans racists. History shows that the Republicans were the party that fought to free our nation of slavery during the Civil War, he said.
“We should at least give Soglin credit for calling it what it is: removing evidence,” said Grabins.
Grabins said that members of the RPDC want to remind citizens of Dane County of a few important historical facts:
  • The Democratic Party filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 83 days.
  • The Democratic leadership overwhelmingly voted against Civil Rights legislation in 1875, 1957, 1960 and 1964.
  • Democratic Governor George Wallace stood in the school doorway preventing black students from attending the University of Alabama.
  • In 2010, the Democratic leadership elected Robert Byrd, (D, W.VA) to be their president pro-tempore of the senate. Byrd was the former Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • The KKK was founded as the military arm of the Democratic party.
 The record of the Democratic party supporting slavery and segregation is part of our nation’s history. That much is indisputable.  Grabins said that Democratic leadership has a long history of racism, lynching, discrimination, Jim Crow laws and deception, and he would like to challenge Soglin to set the record straight.
“The mayor’s essay takes an antiseptic wipe to the memory of American voters. First, by sleight of hand, then by sheer volume of words,” Grabins explained. He encouraged the mayor to rewrite his recent public statement regarding the removal of Confederate statues, taking into account the well-documented historical facts mentioned above. He suggested this alternate wording: “The Democratic party did this. We shouldn’t have. We apologize for the actions of our forbearers. We know our party’s past is offensive to many.”
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